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Canada

Despite CETA signing, Harper’s 2014 agenda remains unambitious

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Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper today celebrated the signing of a landmark free-trade deal between Canada and the European Union, bringing to fruition one of the top accomplishments that Harper can claim since taking office with a minority government in 2006 and a majority government in 2011. Canada Flag Icon

Although the pact won’t be ratified until 2015, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) removes tariffs between Canada’s economy and the $17 trillion economy of the European Union, which comprises 28 countries and over 500 million people.  Together with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it will give Canada exclusive access to more than half of the global economy.  CETA will allow Canadian automakers to export 12 times as many automobiles to Europe, and it will fully open the EU market to Canadian fruits, vegetables, wheat, grains and dairy, while removing tariffs on European wine and spirits, all seafood, metals and minerals (including steel and iron) and up to 29,000 tonnes of European cheese.  Furthermore, Harper is considering granting compensation to Canada’s dairy producers, especially in Québec, if they lose revenue in the wake of the agreement.

What’s more, Harper (pictured above with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso) will be able to brag that his vision for a Canadian-European free trade agreement served as a precedent for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) still being negotiated between the United States and the European Union.

At a time when the Liberal Party has emerged from the brink of political oblivion with the selection of its popular, telegenic leader Justin Trudeau, to lead polls in advance of the 2015 election — an iPolitics/EKOS poll earlier this week gave the Liberals 36% support to just 26% support for Harper’s Conservative Party and 25% for the social progressive New Democratic Party — the completion of CETA and its ratification gives Harper three domestic policy wins.

First, it’s perhaps his most significant policy accomplishment in seven years.  Second, not only does it give him a substantive accomplishment, it gives him one that bolsters the case that he’s dedicated to creating jobs and strengthening Canada’s economy, and it provides a contrast to Trudeau’s often wishy-washy blather.  Third, it hoists a difficult choice on the NDP — support the CETA and anger labor unions, especially within its new Québécois stronghold; or oppose to CETA to draw a stronger contrast to Trudeau’s newly invigorated Liberals.

But don’t expect much more in the way of ambition from Harper’s government this year.

The agreement comes after the reading of Harper’s 2013 Throne Speech, much of which constituted a victory lap detailing Canada’s superior employment and economic record compared to its developed-world peers, such as the United States and the European Union, where political instability, stagnant GDP growth and joblessness have been more acute.  While Harper hopes to pass a law requiring balanced budgets in the future, it’s unclear whether he can actually pass a bill through Canada’s parliament or that future governments would keep it in place.

The rest of Harper’s agenda amounted to an odd mix of populist consumer protection schemes:

The government promised to “take steps to reduce roaming costs” for cellphone users. It says it will take action so that cable and satellite customers can “choose the combination of television channels they want” by “unbundling” channel packages. And it promised to move on “hidden fees,” including making it so that “customers won’t pay extra to receive paper bills.” If this part of the agenda reads like it was pilfered from the NDP, that’s because to some extent it was.

It’s puzzling for a market-oriented party like the Tories to prioritize these kind of measures — services like Netflix and Hulu are already, in part, helped to unbundle television packages through market forces.  Roaming costs for Canadian users are already coming down due to market pressures.  So many of the consumer goals Harper listed are likely to come about through the market without the need for government interference.

It’s equally baffling to know how Harper will reduce ‘geographic price discrimination,’ his term for the price differential between consumer goods sold in Canada and the United States. Presumably, if the price difference is enough, Canadians (90% of whom live within 100 miles of the US border) will make a trip down south to buy them at cheaper prices, or enterprising entrepreneurs will find a way to undercut them — especially in the world of e-commerce.

But even more, it’s small ball.  It’s the Canadian equivalent of former US president Bill Clinton’s much-derided 1995 agenda of school uniforms and ‘v-chips.’  Though consumer protection initiatives aren’t nothing, it’s hardly the kind of bold, conservative agenda that you might have expected Harper to champion upon coming to power seven years ago, and surely not what you’d expect from a government just two years after finally capturing a majority government.

John Ivison, writing in The National Post, likened the Throne Speech to ‘a botox treatment gone bad’:

The Throne Speech is littered with examples of the government wading into sectors of the economy to “fix” problems that should be left to either the market or the existing regulators — all to the detriment of millions of Canadian shareholders.  It’s all so transparent and light as tinsel.

But it’s not just this year’s Throne Speech.

Aside from CETA, it’s hard to point to any truly groundbreaking, signature legislative acts in the Harper era.  Sure, the government reduced the rate of the Goods and Services Tax from 7% to 5% by January 2008, and it will likely balance Canada’s budget by 2015.  But those accomplishments, significant as they are, won’t be remembered in 50 or 100 years in the same way that CETA could be remembered.  Continue reading Despite CETA signing, Harper’s 2014 agenda remains unambitious →

Canada, Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia Liberal landslide an omen for federal Canadian politics?

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No one will say it’s exactly the blockbuster story of the year, but it’s worth taking note of the landslide victory of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party last night in Atlantic Canada’s most populous province.

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Take all the usual caveats — provincial politics is very different from federal politics, and the federal Liberal Party is not the same as the Nova Scotia Liberal Party.  The federal Conservative Party is certainly not the same as the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party.  And the federal New Democratic Party remains in the opposition, while the NDP in Nova Scotia was defending a provincial government.

But the general landscape still mirrors the federal political scene in a way that makes Nova Scotia a better bellwether than other provinces, unlike in Québec, where provincial politics really does revolve around a different axis of policy issues.  Or in the Canadian west, where the Progressive Conservative party in Alberta is the more center-left of the province’s two main parties, the Liberal Party in British Columbia is the center-right option, and where the conservative provincial party is simply the Saskatchewan Party.  The NDP’s 2009 landslide in Nova Scotia in many ways presaged the ‘orange wave’ in the federal 2011 election, wherein the federal NDP far surpassed the Liberals to become Canada’s second-largest political party and the official opposition.

Under leader Stephen McNeil, the Liberals won more support (45.52%) than any party in a Nova Scotian provincial election since 1993, and the Liberals will hold 33 seats in the 51-member Nova Scotia House of Assembly.  That’s even more than the New Democrats, under outgoing premier Darrell Dexter, won (31) in the 2009 election.

Dexter lost his own seat by a slim margin, and the NDP’s caucus will be reduced to just seven seats on 26.90% of the vote.  The Progressive Conservatives, who controlled the provincial government between 1999 and 2009, won just 11 seats on 26.39% of the vote.

But it’s really hard not to see Stephen McNeil’s win as the first electoral evidence that the Liberals are back — and running strong.

McNeil and the Liberals were leading polls to return to government in Nova Scotia long before Justin Trudeau was anointed as the federal Liberal leader and all but prime minister-in-waiting.  But McNeil (pictured above, right, with Trudeau, left) looks like he could be Trudeau’s older brother.

There were other lessons from Halifax for federal Canadian politics, too.  It was somewhat of a relief for pollsters to have forecasted the results more or less accurately after virtually no one foresaw two high-profile recent upset victories — in Alberta in April 2012 and in British Columbia in May 2013.

It’s also a harbinger for Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.  In Alberta, where voters gave the benefit of the doubt to the Progressive Conservatives and reelected premier Alison Redford, the unemployment rate is 5%.  In British Columbia, voters reelected premier Christy Clark and gave the Liberals a fourth consecutive term of government, the unemployment rate is 6.7%.  Nova Scotia, without the rich mineral wealth that has resulted in a boom for western Canada, unemployment is running at 9%.  That’s not a fact that will be lost on Harper, whose Tories have now fallen behind the Trudeau-era Grits in national polls.

The national unemployment rate (7.2%) lies somewhere in between the two extremes.  The Canadian economy is marking equivalent or slightly higher GDP growth than the United States and in 2011, Canadian voters rewarded Stephen Harper for steering Canada through the global financial crisis without the staggering bank failures, the ragged political strife or the soaring unemployment that the United States suffered.  For Harper to win in 2015, he’ll need more voters who feel like Albertans and British Columbians than Nova Scotians.

Canada, Nova Scotia

Three lessons that Nova Scotia’s provincial election can teach us about Canadian politics

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Voters in the heart of Atlantic Canada will go to the polls tomorrow to determine the fate of the first New Democratic provincial government in the history of the Maritimes. nova scotiaCanada Flag Icon

Polls show that, under the weight of a patchy economy and low job creation, Nova Scotians will reject premier Darrell Dexter’s historic NDP government in favor of a Liberal Party government under Stephen McNeil — the Liberals hold a lead of between 15% and 20% in advance of the October 8 election, and voters prefer McNeil as Nova Scotia’s next premier by a slightly smaller margin.

While it may not be as populous as Ontario, Québec or British Columbia, Nova Scotia — with just under 3% of Canada’s population — is still the largest province in Atlantic Canada, which historically has a different cultural, political and economic orientation from the rest of Canada.  With an economy that once roared in the 19th century (on the basis of shipbuilding and transatlantic trade), Atlantic Canada now features some of the most stagnant economies within Canada, and regional unemployment runs highest in the Maritimes.  Despite some economic growth in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital and the largest metropolitan area in Atlantic Canada, the province’s 8.7% unemployment rate is still higher than Canada’s national 7.1% average.

Atlantic Canada, notably New Brunswick, was the last refuge of the old Progressive Conservative Party before it merged with Stephen Harper’s western-based Canadian Alliance in 2003 to form the Conservative Party that governs Canada today.  In the 2001 federal Canadian election, the PCs won nine of their 12 seats in the House of Commons from within Atlantic Canada.  Even today, Atlantic Canada remains home to a certain kind of Conservative politics — more moderate and less ideological — and the local center-right provincial party still calls itself the Progressive Conservative Party (remember that in Canada, there’s a brighter line between national and provincial political parties).  Before Harper came to power in 2005, Tories placed their hope to retake national power in former New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord; Nova Scotia MP Peter MacKay led the PCs into their merger with the Alliance a decade ago, and he served as Harper’s defense minister for six years before a promotion this summer to justice minister.

The fate of the old Progressive Conservatives might have been foreboding to the national Liberal Party as well.  In the most recent 2011 Canadian election, in which the once-mighty Liberals lost all but 34 of their seats in the House of Commons, the Liberals won 12 of them from Atlantic Canada — again, a party struggling for relevance nationally found refuge in the Maritimes.  But while the Progressive Conservatives ultimately faded into Harper’s wider conservative movement, the election of Justin Trudeau as the party’s national leader earlier this transformed the Liberals from a spent, third-place political force into something like a government-in-waiting.

So even though Nova Scotia is small, it can also be a bellwether for larger trends.

While Trudeau’s leadership has breathed new life into the Liberal brand (even at the provincial level), McNeil and the Nova Scotia Liberals held a wide lead over the NDP in the province long before Trudeau’s national ascent.  It’s a remarkable turnaround from the June 2009 provincial elections when the NDP swept to power with 45.24% of the vote, winning 31 out of the 52 seats in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly and ending a decade of Tory rule in the province — a victory that presaged the NDP’s 2011 federal breakthrough under its late leader Jack Layton.

Keeping all of that in mind, here are three areas to keep an eye on in the wake of tomorrow’s election that could presage trends over the next two years of Canadian politics more generally: Continue reading Three lessons that Nova Scotia’s provincial election can teach us about Canadian politics →

British Columbia, Canada

How the British Columbia Liberals managed to pull off such a stunning upset victory over the NDP

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The incumbent British Columbia Liberal Party, under the leadership of premier Christy Clark in her first provincial-wide election, has held on to power for a fourth consecutive government, despite the fact that the British Columbia New Democratic Party was heavily favored throughout the campaign to win the election.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

This was definitely a surprise, given that the BC NDP was leading by nearly 20 points two months ago, and even though polls showed a narrowing race in Canada’s third-largest province, forecasters still believed the BC NDP a heavy favorite just a day ago that showed a narrowing race in Canada’s third-largest province.  No poll showed the BC Liberals leading this race, though polls showed Clark narrowing the gap against BC NDP opposition leader Adrian Dix.

As of around 1:15 am EST on Wednesday morning, the BC Liberals have been elected to 45 seats and were leading in 51 seats, while the BC NDP had been elected to 27 seats and leading in just 32.  Andrew Weaver was set to become the province’s first Green Party legislator, with one independent rounding out the membership of the 85-seat provincial assembly.  Given that the BC Liberals held 45 seats going into the election and the BC NDP held 36 seats, the BC NDP may well have lost seats on Tuesday.

In particular, former Vancouver mayor from 2005 to 2008, Sam Sullivan, was handily elected to a seat in the Vancouver-False Creek riding for the BC Liberals.  Clark was leading, just slightly, in her own constituency in Vancouver Point Grey against a strong challenge from the BC NDP’s David Eby (NB: if Clark doesn’t win, it’s expected that a colleague will step down to allow Clark to win a speedy by-election).

It’s, of course, really bad news for Dix, whose leadership should almost certainly come to an end with Tuesday’s disastrous result.  It’s really bad news for Thomas Mulcair, the opposition leader of Canada and federal NDP leader, who had embraced Dix and the provincial NDP in a way that federal Liberals had not embraced Clark and the BC Liberals.

It’s the second upset in as many years in western Canada — in Alberta in April 2012, nearly every pollster showed that another longtime incumbent party was set to lose power.  But Alison Redford, the beleaguered incumbent premier, led her Progressive Conservative Party to victory against a challenge from Wildrose, a new party that had run both to the social and fiscal right of Redford.

So how did the BC Liberals do it?  Here are four reasons that explain what happened Tuesday in British Columbia. Continue reading How the British Columbia Liberals managed to pull off such a stunning upset victory over the NDP →

British Columbia, Bulgaria, Canada, Pakistan, Philippines

Four world elections in four days: Pakistan, Bulgaria, the Philippines, and British Columbia

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It’s an incredibly busy weekend for world elections, with four key elections on three continents coming in the next four days.

Pakistan

First up, on Saturday, May 11, are national elections in Pakistan, where voters will determine the composition of the 342-member National Assembly, of which 272 seats will be determined by direct election in single-member constituencies on a first-past-the-post basis.Pakistan Flag Icon

With 180 million people and with nearly 60% of them under the age of 30, the elections in Pakistan will by far have the most global impact by implicating South Asia’s economy and not only regional, but global security with U.S. interests keen to mark a stable transition, especially after a particularly violent campaign season marked with attacks by the Pakistani Taliban.

The incumbent government led by the leftist Pakistan People’s Party, the party of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, is expected to falter.  Their expense is likely to come at the gain of the more conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who is a slight favorite to once again become Pakistan’s prime minister on the strength of support in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.  But the upstart nationalist, anti-corruption Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) is expected to make a strong challenge under the leadership of Imran Khan, the charismatic former cricket star.

Read all of Suffragio‘s coverage of Pakistan here.

Bulgaria

On Sunday, May 12, it’s Bulgaria’s turn, and voters will decide who controls the unicameral National Assembly .bulgaria flag

When the 2008 global financial crisis hit, the center-left Bulgarian Socialist Party was in office under prime minister Sergei Stanishev.  Voters promptly ejected Stanishev and the Socialists in the 2009 elections in exchange for a new conservative party, Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) under the wildly popular Boyko Borissov.  Since 2009, however, Borissov and GERB have become massively unpopular, and rising power costs and general economic malaise have made conditioned markedly worse.  The depressed economy and a wiretapping scandal have left the race essentially a tossup between the Socialists and GERB, though a number of small parties, including an far-right nationalist party and an ethnic Turkish party, are expected to win seats.

Of the 240 seats in the National Assembly, 209 will be determined by proportional representation (with a 4% threshold for entering parliament) and 31 will be determined in single-member districts.  With just 7.5 million people, Bulgaria is on the periphery of the European Union — if the result is close and no party wins a majority, it will cause some concern in Brussels, but because Bulgaria isn’t a member of the eurozone, that outcome wouldn’t necessarily cause any wider financial problems.

Read Suffragio‘s overview of the Bulgarian election here.

The Philippines

The action moves back to Asia on Monday, May 13, when the Philippines votes in midterm elections to determine one-half of the Senate’s 24 seats and all of the 222 seats in the Philippine House of Representatives.philippines

Although, with 94 million people, the Philippines has a population of just about half that of Pakistan, it’s a strategic country with an increasingly important economic, cultural and military alliance with the United States as U.S. policymakers ‘pivot’ to Asia.  It doesn’t hurt that the country’s economic growth rate in 2012 of 6.6% was the fastest in all of Asia, excepting the People’s Republic of China.

All of which means that the current president, Benigno ‘PNoy’ Aquino III, whose father was the opposition leader assassinated in 1983 and whose mother, Corazon Aquino, became Philippine president in 1986 after 21 years of rule by Ferdinand Marcos, is an incredibly popular head of state.  His electoral coalition, ‘Team PNoy,’ dominated by his own Liberal Party, is widely expected to make big gains, giving Aquino a little more help facing an unfriendly legislature.

Read all of Suffragio‘s coverage of The Philippines here.

British Columbia

Finally, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, voters in Canada’s third-most populous province, British Columbia, will vote for all 85 members of its legislative assembly on Tuesday, May 14.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

The British Columbia Liberal Party is seeking its fourth consecutive mandate since Gordon Campbell won elections in 2001, 2005 and 2009.  After stepping down in 2011, his successor Christy Clark finds herself waging an uphill battle to win over the hearts of an electorate jaded by scandal after scandal.  The frontrunner to become the next premier is Adrian Dix, the leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party, though his opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline and a feisty campaign by the Liberals have whittled a 20-point lead two months ago to just single digits.

Though British Columbia is home to just 4.4 million people, the result will have important implications for Canada’s energy industry as well as potential implications for the NDP’s national future — a high-profile loss for Dix will only spell further trouble for the national party.

Read Suffragio‘s overview of the British Columbia election here.

British Columbia, Canada

BC NDP holds overwhelming lead in advance of British Columbia elections

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With a month and a half before voters in Canada’s largest western province go to the polls, the New Democratic Party of British Columbia under opposition leader Adrian Dix seems set to take control of the provincial government after over a decade of rule by the British Columbia Liberal Party, though the official campaign has yet to begin.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

British Columbia is, in many ways, the future of Canada — oriented toward the Asia-Pacific rim, not toward the United Kingdom and the Atlantic.  The province’s welcoming approach to immigration, including a large wave of Cantonese-speaking Chinese from Hong Kong in advance of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong control from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, was a prologue to what’s now happening all over Canada.  As of a decade ago, while 75% of British Columbians spoke English only, just around 2% were exclusive French speakers, and nearly 25% spoke a number of languages other than English or French, and the province’s diversity has only grown in the past decade.

Nearly 10% of British Columbia’s population today is Chinese in origin, nearly 6% is Indian in origin.

The reality of British Columbia — and increasingly, the reality of Canada nationwide — is making nonsense of the eastern bilingual French/English divide that underlined the constitutional fights of the late 20th century.

With over 4.5 million people (around 13% of Canada’s population), it’s still less populous than Ontario or Québec, but it’s growing at a faster rate than either, with an economy split between a traditional dominance on forestry and tourism and the growing importance of mining — much like its neighbor to the east, Alberta.

Polls for the past year have shown a wide lead for the BC NDP in the elections scheduled for May 14 — a recent mid-March Angus Reid poll gives the BC NDP 48% support to just 28% support for the BC Liberals, and 11% each for the British Columbia Green Party and the British Columbia Conservative Party — the BC Conservatives take 17% in the province’s interior, while the Greens win 18% on Vancouver Island: Continue reading BC NDP holds overwhelming lead in advance of British Columbia elections →

Canada, Ontario

Kennedy falters as Pupatello and Wynne lead race to become Ontario premier

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When Dalton McGuinty announced late last year that he would step down simultaneously as both leader of the Ontario Liberal Party and Ontario’s premier, it made this month’s Liberal leadership contest also a contest to become Ontario’s next premier.Canada Flag Iconontario

It’s not the best of times for McGuinty, who lost an opportunity to regain a majority government in Ontario’s unicameral legislative assembly after losing two by-elections last autumn.  The losses came after McGuinty passed — with the support of the opposition Progressive Conservative Party — a bill that froze wages for public teachers and denies the right to strike for the following two years.  The bill was seen as a massive betrayal by teachers’ unions that were key to McGuinty’s electoral victories since first becoming premier in 2003.

So his stepping down, after a decade in power, was seen as an opportunity for the Ontario Liberals to reboot before what’s likely to be an upcoming election (although the next election need not take place before October 2015) — and polls show his party in third place, behind both the Tories and the progressive New Democratic Party, and only leading by the narrowest of margins in the greater Toronto area, one of the last bastions of support for provincial and federal Liberals alike.

Originally, it seemed like the runner-up to McGuinty in the previous 1996 leadership race, Gerard Kennedy, was the frontrunner. But poor organization and his unpopularity among party insiders have pushed him to the background.

After delegates were selected over the weekend for the Ontario Liberal conference scheduled for January 25 to 27, two frontrunners have emerged — Sandra Pupatello (pictured above, bottom) and Kathleen Wynne (pictured above, top).

Pupatello won the greatest number of pledged delegates with 27%, followed closely by Wynne with 25%.  Kennedy fell far behind with just 14%, with Punjab-born MPP Harinder Takhar in a narrow fourth place with 13%.  Two remaining candidates — Charles Sousa (11%) and Eric Hoskins (6%) — followed far behind.

While there are independent and other ex officio delegates who will also be able to participate in the leadership vote, the pledged delegates clearly seem to indicate that the race will come down to Pupatello and Wynne who, like Kennedy, have all held the position of Ontario’s minister of education in the past decade.

Wynne, who would be Canada’s first openly-gay provincial premier, has been a member of the Ontario legislature since 2003, and she served as minister of education from 2006 to 2010; thereafter, she served as minister of transportation and then minister of municipal affairs and housing and aboriginal affairs.  Ideologically, she’s to the left of Pupatello, which could help her steal voters who might otherwise support the NDP in any future election.

Pupatello served in the Ontario legislature from 1995 to 2011, when she resigned to take a job as director of business and global markets at PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Aside from a stint as minister of education in 2006, she served as minister of economic development and innovation for much of the last five years of her legislative career.  She’s seen as more center-right than either Kennedy or Wynne, and she’s also perceived as the ‘establishment’ candidate as well.

Pupatello, 10 years younger than Wynne, is also seen as the more spirited campaigner, a quality that Liberal voters might like to see in a leader who will have to fight tooth-and-nail to retain power after the next provincial election.   Continue reading Kennedy falters as Pupatello and Wynne lead race to become Ontario premier →

Canada, Quebec

What effect will the Québec election have on Canadian federal politics?

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With all eyes on Québec’s election next Tuesday, federal Canadian politics has somewhat been on the backburner for the past month.

But what are the consequences of the election in Canada’s second most-populous province for federal Canadian politics?

By and large, federal politics is highly segregated from provincial politics.  While there’s some overlap, provincial parties do not necessarily line up with national parties (for example, in Alberta, both the Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party are considered ‘conservative’ by federal standards and both parties attracted support from the federal Conservative Party in Alberta’s provincial election in April 2012).  That’s especially true in francophone Québec — the province has greater autonomy than most provinces, historically leans more leftist than the rest of Canada, and features its own separate federalist / sovereigntist political axis that is unique to Québec.

Nonetheless, a possible win by either of the three major parties — a fourth-consecutive term for premier Jean Charest and his Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ), Pauline Marois and the sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ) or former PQ minister François Legault’s newly-formed Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ). — could affect federal Canadian politics in subtle ways.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party

There’s little downside for the federal Conservatives in any case, especially considering that Harper hasn’t devoted time or effort to backing anyone in the Québec race.

Charest, of course, once served as the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party in the 1990s before moving to provincial politics — the Progressive Conservatives ultimately merged with Harper’s Western-based Canadian Alliance in 2003 to become the Conservative Party.  Although Charest has been a staunch federalist in nearly a decade of leading Québec’s government, he hasn’t always had the best relationship with Harper (pictured above, left, with Charest).  That’s partly due to the tension between a provincial premier and a federal prime minister, but Harper, in particular, is still thought to feel somewhat burned after intervening on behalf of Charest in the final days of the 2007 Québec election.

Harper provided $2 million in additional federal transfers to Québec that may well have helped premier Jean Charest narrowly win that election — Charest proceeded to use the funds to pass $700 million in tax cuts instead of for extra services, causing Harper problems with his allies in other provinces.   Continue reading What effect will the Québec election have on Canadian federal politics? →